Like the iMac and Mac Mini videos, the new MacBook Pro video is available to watch on Apple’s website by clicking the “watch the announcement” link on the product page or over on the company’s YouTube channel. This video yet again starts with Apple’s SVP of engineering, John Ternus, doing the hardware reveal honors. He says it’s “packed with pro features, Apple Intelligence, and Apple silicon that’s more powerful than ever before.” Then he opens the new notebook and a gust of wind blows his hair back.
Next comes senior engineering program manager for Mac systems Trevor McLeod who reveals that the new entry M4 MacBook Pro, still starting at $1,599, now comes in space black color, which was previously reserved for the higher-end specs. McLeod says the new 14-inch M4 is up to 1.8 times faster than the M1 for tasks like editing photos and has a neural engine that’s “up to 3 times more powerful than in M1,” which helps make Apple Intelligence features perform better. Like the iMac and Mac Mini, the MacBook Pro line has also shed the anemic 8GB RAM base option and now starts with 16GB for the entry-level model with the M4 chip.
Meanwhile, the M4 Pro version of the MacBook Pro now starts with 24GB of RAM instead of 18GB from the M3 Pro version. According to Apple’s VP of platform architecture, Tim Millet, the higher-end M4 Max chip option has 16 CPU cores and 40 GPU cores. Plus, it has more than half a terabyte per second of unified memory bandwidth that has “four times the bandwidth of the latest AI PC chip.” Apple also flashed a CPU performance chart that promises the M4 Max is 1.2 times faster than the M3 Max.